Best Practices for Enhancing the Performance of Web Applications

The speed at which web pages download and are shown in a user’s web browser is known as web application performance. The requirement and importance of a website’s speed cannot be overstated. Search engine rankings, page views, higher conversion rates, and even decreased server bandwidth costs are just a few of the advantages that optimization brings. In light of mobile connections, these characteristics are extremely crucial.

Minify Resources (CSS, Javascript and HTML)

The process of minification involves eliminating all unused white space, line breaks, comments, and extraneous semicolons from the source code. This technique shrinks file sizes. As a result, load times are quicker and the bandwidth load is lower. It’s crucial to minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while building a quality website. Additionally, minification lowers bandwidth use while loading websites on mobile devices with a limited data plan. .

Benefits of Minify Resource:

1. Reduce load times: Speed up the loading of your website by immediately reducing bandwidth allotments.
2. Reduce file size by removing unnecessary data : Minification can yield as much as a 60 percent file size reduction
3. Better performance and User Experience : Greatly reduced file size, which will be quicker to load website
4. Higher SERP Ranking: Gain SERP high ranking using optimization techniques

Image Optimization

Mastering Image optimization is an art that involves minimising the file size of your photographs as much as possible without sacrificing quality, so that your page load times remain low. Images make up on average 21% of the weight of a webpage. The ideal image file size and resolution are under 70 KB and 72 dpi, respectively. Use web fonts instead of photos since they load faster, look better, and don’t need to be scaled with the image.

Benefits of image optimization:

1. Improved search rankings: Pay attention to how you name the image files, It’s easier for web crawlers to find you by allocating descriptive labels to each image.
2. Cost savings: Smaller image file sizes use less bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money
3. Reduced bounce rates: Users are more likely to stay on the web application when it’s loads quickly.
4. User Experience: Optimized images speedup your web pages, which creates optimal user experience.

Right File Format:

1. SVG: SVG graphics will scale indefinitely and will remain super sharp at any resolution. SVG size can be minimize by compressing them with gzip
2. PNG: PNGs can have transparent backgrounds with highly usable in different web design contexts, PNG load much slower than JPEGs but preferred format for illustrations, typography, and company logos
3. JPEG or JPG: JPEG does support 24-bit color with up to 16 million colors. Smaller files size is the best way to load web application faster
4. GIF: Limited color palette of 256 colors. Animated and smaller in size which supports transparent backgrounds

Reduce Redirect

Redirects (301, 302) sluggish the pages and ruin the application’s speed. When possible, stay away from them. The time it takes to load the initial HTML content before the browser even begins to load other files is immediately doubled by a redirect since it generates additional round trip delays (RTT). Utilizing software like Screaming Frog, you can identify every redirect and remove all except the most important pieces.

Caching

Caching is a concept where frequently used data is kept here rather than in RAM to reduce latency when the system is reading the specific data. Utilizing the caching options is the most effective way to stop this problem. If setup properly, browsers will keep the files in their local cache rather than downloading the same assets again when visiting the same page.

Whether or not the cached content has expired determines whether or not a piece of content is stale. If the material has already been cached, the browser loads it straight from its cache rather than going through the server.

Using caching, there are numerous ways to enhance the performance of an application:

1. Client Caching:
2. Web Server Caching:
3. Database Caching:
4. Application Caching:
5. Database Query Level Caching:
6. Object Level Caching:
7. CDN Caching:

Reduce the Server Calls and Use HTTP2/SPDY3.1

When there are more HTTP requests, it will take longer for the web pages to load. Up to 80% of the load time is taken up by downloading the scripts, stylesheets, and graphics. When a visitor tries to access your website, it makes more HTTP requests, renders the page slowly, and takes longer to load the web pages.

All of the major browsers and servers support the HTTP/2 protocol, which greatly speeds up page load times. It was developed from the SPDY protocol, which is pronounced “speedy,” to enhance the online experience by accelerating page loads and cutting down on round-trip times (RTT), particularly on resource-intensive web pages. HTTP/2 is binary, not text-based. Instead of being ordered and blocked, it is completely multiplexed. One connection may be used for parallelism. To cut down on overhead, header compression is used. Utilizes the ALPN extension, which speeds up encrypted connections by letting servers and browsers choose which application protocol to employ first.

SSL is necessary for SPDY3.1 in order to use the SPDY protocol and all of its features. The stream-based compression technique used by SPDY has a small window for protocol flaws. Although fast, SPDY’s encrypted connections do not make use of the ALPN extension.

Many ways to reduce HTTP Requests:

1. Don’t use unnecessary plugins, images, JavaScript, and CSS
2. Don’t use third party frameworks unless they are absolutely needed
3. Bundle your assets together. Combine the JavaScript files and CSS files into one.
4. Removing Unnecessary Videos

Prefetch and Preconnect

Prefetch: Precautions must be taken while using this strategy because the prefetch hint uses extra bytes for resources that are not immediately required. Adding <link rel=prefetch> to a web page tells the browser to download entire pages, or some of the resources (like scripts or CSS files), that the user might need in the future:

<link rel="prefetch" href="/view/" as="deshoard">

Preconnect: Pre-connecting origins can help websites load faster for users. This improvement can be quantifiable for some websites. Pre-connecting enables the browser to obtain and cache external resources in anticipation of user requests. The majority of these external resources are URLs that can speed up your website if they are pre-connected.

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://www.xyz.com">

Compress Files

By utilising a compression technique, compression is the process of reducing file sizes. a compression in which the compressed file contains every bit of data from the original file. Compression is an easy-to-use, efficient method of increasing your site’s speed and lowering the amount of bandwidth needed.

There are two commonly used HTTP compression schemes on the web today:

1. DEFLATE: DEFLATE is a very popular compression algorithm which generally wraps up data using the LZ77, algorithm and Huffman coding
2. GZIP: GZIP is a file format that uses DEFLATE internally, along with some interesting blocking, filtering heuristics, a header and a checksum. GZIP uses give it better compression ratios than DEFLATE alone

Database Optimization

The database has a significant impact on the web application’s performance as well. With the help of query optimisation and database performance, we can achieve astronomical gains in application speed. When working together, developers and DBAs are frequently needed to do so in large organisations. In these situations, it has been observed that disagreements between the two teams occur frequently. There are several methods for tuning SQL databases.

1. Using and Drooping temporary tables according to requirement
2. Avoid coding loops
3. Execution plans
4. Proper indexing
5. Retrieve the relevant data only
6. Getting rid of correlated subqueries

Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The performance, security, and dependability of the website are all enhanced by the content delivery network. For websites that receive a lot of traffic, such as Facebook (social media), Netflix (media streaming), and Amazon (e-commerce). The key element in the distribution of web information to users with the least amount of delay across a geographically scattered set of servers is the CDN. Reducing bandwidth and latency is one of the key advantages of using CDNs. The browsing experience is improved and page load times are decreased with the aid of CDNs.

Additional Web Application Performance Solutions

• Remove unnecessary Custom Fonts
• Lazy Loading
• Use responsive images and WebP
• Remove unused CSS and Javascript
• Remove unused/Optimize the Video
• Replacement of Vector Graphics
• SSL Certificate/HTTPS
• 404 Error
• Infrastructure Improvement
• Implementing Load Balancing